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CBA promises loan process review to brokers

Commonwealth Bank's Kathy Cummings says brokers and banks can do more to improve productivity. She speaks to Australian Broker TV about what brokers can do to become more efficient and about the bank's plans to review its loan process before the year end.

Video transcript below:

Donna Sawyer, Australian Broker TV
Donna Sawyer: The mortgage industry needs to take a good hard look at its productivity. That’s the view of Commonwealth Bank’s, Kathy Cummings, who says improving work flows is a business imperative, particularly in a low credit growth environment.

Kathy Cummings, Commonwealth Bank

Kathy Cummings: We all know with the rather flat or very low credit growth environment we’re in, it’s been tough, right. And so therefore we need to look at how can we reduce overheads, how can we work more effectively, how can we remove waste, stop errors and rework. We know that the increased regulatory environment and compliance has put additional overheads and costs in there, so we need to work together to try and remove all these things. They affect your the broker’s work day and affect ours.

Donna Sawyer: She says there are simple things brokers can do to become more efficient.

Kathy Cummings: I am a great believer and disciple of Stephen Covey and one of his seven habits is begin with the end in mind. So I think good brokers, in fact all businesses should have a very clear business plan. So when they are working though their goals and their business objectives, you know things like a visual management board to keep them focused on where their goals are and how they track into the business objectives. More importantly and you will be amazed at what we have seen, they need to have a clean work space for themselves and for their staff. And so things like doing a 5 days workshop that we do in the Kaizen Lean program means they will focus on getting their work space nice and clean for them. So a) they can actually find their files and b) they can actually see their monitor.

Donna Sawyer: And it’s not just brokers that should be improving their productivity, Kathy Cummings says broker feedback that banks can do more has been taken on board.

Kathy Cummings: They are right. And we have a saying inside CBA that there is nothing so ineffective as doing something efficiently that shouldn’t be done at all, right. So one of the things we are doing is focusing on our productivity in all our processes. And I can assure all our broker customers out there, that it’s a KPI in mind and it’s certainly is in my team. We will be starting an interim review of our total home loan process later on this year. We have just completed a review of our credit process and we have got some recommendations going forward on that for the third party piece. We do listen, we do listen and things like we are just piloting a new AVM process, automatic valuation method for valuations is one of the things where we are looking to cut out rework and short vals and give brokers a more efficient and effective answer to their queries.

Donna Sawyer: This is Donna Sawyer reporting for Australian Broker TV.